Juan Muñoz

I hold a PhD in Chemistry and 13 years of research experience in Life Sciences at international institutions.

At the Instituto de Investigaciones Químicas (CSIC, Sevilla, Spain), I developed a research project on the characterisation of drug-protein interactions by a combination of NMR spectroscopy techniques and computational simulations. My work led to several awards, including a PhD thesis award and for best oral communication at an international conference.

At the University of Oxford, I successfully led an industrial research project funded by UCB Celltech on the refinement and characterisation of membrane proteins and their interactions with drugs and lipids by biophysical experiments and computational chemistry methods. My work contributed to UCB’s research by providing key structural data on membrane proteins of their drug development pipeline.

At the University of East Anglia, I led computational chemistry and biomaterials characterisation projects, in collaboration with Croda and Unilever, and mentored early-stage researchers. In addition, I was instructor of workshops on the use of scientific software, administered a computing cluster and provided IT support to users.

At the University Pablo de Olavide, funded by Bristol Myers Squibb, I led the data analysis of databases to identify functional motifs of pharmaceutical interest. This included python programming for searching and analysing protein sequences and structural data from large databases, and data collection, curation, visualization, clustering (e.g. t-SNE) and modelling (machine learning).

Currently, I am Visiting Scientist at the University of East Anglia, mentor of early-career researchers for the REBECA by EURAXESS mentoring programme, co-editor of a Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences issue, and External Expert Evaluator and Rapporteur of COST Action proposals. I have been recently awarded with a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship to work at CSIC (National Research Council in Spain).

In addition, I am content creator (blog and podcast) on the ethical and social implications of artificial intelligence-based technologies (https://thewrongroom.wordpress.com/, https://open.spotify.com/show/2QFH8ZbveiitiyaVx90etY?si=bec418aa19b54efa&nd=1).

I master English language, I am a proactive and problem solving scientist and I have demonstrated excellent leadership, collaborative and organizational skills within multidisciplinary and international teams. I have excellent computer and data analysis skills; for instance, I am an experienced Linux user and I have programming experience in Python (Pandas, Numpy, Matplotlib, Seaborn, Scikit-learn, Tensorflow, Streamlit).

I believe that my international experience within top multidisciplinary teams in the areas of NMR spectroscopy, biomaterials characterisation, bioinformatics and chemoinformatics, and data analytics, and my advocacy for AI ethics is, therefore, of high value to positively contribute to the Bioexpert Network.

Thank you very much for your time and consideration. I would be happy to provide you with any further information you may request.